The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "suspect" ...
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Wilmington's Street Wars
Wilmington, Del., has become one of the most violent cities of its size in America. Nothing dramatized that fact more than several spectacular shootings in 2012, including one day in June when three people were shot to death in separate incidents, and a shootout a few weeks later at a soccer tournament that killed three people -- including a teenager waiting to play the game he loved. To document and study the violence he and other News Journal colleagues were covering, senior reporter Cris Barrish gathered information for a database detailing the 158 shootings, including 42 homicides, over a 20-month period. He learned that police made arrests in only one-third of the cases, many of which collapsed in court. His research into why police could not solve cases led to the revelation that both shooting suspects and victims had been arrested an average of about two dozen times, with many qualifying as habitual criminals -- a phenomenon that some authorities call "thugicide.'' His stories also explored the “don’t snitch’’ code of the streets that cripples prosecution of these cases, not only by the men on both sides of the gun barrel, but also by residents who are terrified of the gunmen and distrustful of law enforcement.
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Trail of the Gun
After a wave of gun violence in Seattle, KING 5 examined some of the most basic techniques that police use to solve gun crimes. By analyzing documents received through public records requests the television station learned that most large police departments in Washington state are not conducting routine ballistics tests on the so-called “crime guns” they seize from suspects and crime scenes. This means that guns, that could hold clues to unsolved crimes, are sitting right under investigators’ noses in their own evidence rooms. The investigative series "Trail of the Gun" also unearthed the results of federal firearms “traces”, which police use to determine how a gun ended up in the hands of a criminal. These trace results revealed that a large number of Seattle’s crime guns came from an unexpected place. After the stories aired, several large police departments pledged to begin ballistics testing programs for their crime guns. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms offered to assist local police agencies to test every gun in their evidence rooms. And, the feds unveiled a warrant targeting one of the gun dealers identified in the series.
Tags: Guns; gun crimes; police
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Broken Justice in Phillips County
A five-part series preceded by an initial investigation into dysfunction in the criminal justice system in an Arkansas Delta county known for corruption and poverty. The year-long investigation uncovered errors and archaic practices in the handling of fugitive warrants and speedy trials that allowed felony suspects to remain free for years without fear of answering to the charges against them. As a result, prosecutors had to drop hundreds of cases for failure to take them to trial in a timely manner. Since publication, the Phillips County sheriff has made changes in how his office handles failure-to-appear warrants, and court officials have reduced case backlogs. Nevertheless, problems persist.
Tags: Criminal justice system; corruption; poverty; fugitive warrants
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Bales: Army suspect in Afghan shooting was liable in financial fraud
On the day that tips arose about a U.S. soldier who may have strafed two Afghan villages, I left the office for a flight to Tacoma. Within 48 hours of the soldier’s being identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, I and two colleagues broke the news that the emerging hagiography of Bales drafted by family and attorneys had more to it than the story of a soldier who enlisted at the ripe of 27 driven by outrage over the 2001 terrorist attacks—and then broken down by an unrelenting cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our story started with pure spidey senses: Bales’ s family and lawyer said he had left a stockbroker’s career to enlist, as they explained his call to serve. Yet he had not finished college and clearly had financial troubles, I had determined. And he was active in brokerage in the late 1990s in Florida I learned by checking assorted online records—which raised my suspicions about the quick-money penny stock trading that was commonplace then. Based on those instincts, while also doing the running daily story from Bales’ Army base in Washington state, I had checked some online brokerage records and enlisted Julie Tate to look at others and run through civil and criminal filings in Ohio (Bales’s home state and then nationally). Within an hour, I had found one suspicious record and Julie had found others and we were off on a 30-hour run of investigative reporting and boots on the ground interviews that yielded the breaking news of Bales’s more complicated—and less laudatory—past in the period just before he joined the Army. We located and I interviewed an elderly couple who had lost substantial savings in accounts managed by Bales and received copies of detailed financial records that corroborated their claims and showed Bales as the account manager. We also peeled back corporate records for a now-shuttered firm run by Bales and his brother with backing from a longtime friend and reached him to further flesh out the checkered professional history of the Staff Sgt. at the center of an explosive, fast-moving and intensely competitive story. The story demanded intense investigative reporting that netted notable results in far far less than 30 days of a breaking event.
Tags: U.S. soldier; Afghanistan; military draft; terrorist attacks; deployment
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Meningitis Outbreak
When an unprecedented outbreak of fungal meningitis began last fall in Tennessee, The Tennessean reacted with aggressive and highly interactive coverage that has led the nation. Before other media realized the significance of the outbreak, which has sickened more than 650 people in 19 states, The Tennessean was already analyzing the regulation of specialty pharmacies and digging into the contracts and connections of the New England Compounding Center, the Massachusetts firm suspected of shipping contaminated steroids responsible for the illnesses. As of today, the outbreak has killed 40 people nationwide, 14 of them in Tennessee. More than a hundred more are still sick. We quickly reported problems associated with New England Compounding Center, lag times on informing victims and regulation slip-ups in the drug compounding industry that allowed companies to operate outside of the law.
Tags: Health; meningitis; New England Compounding Center; steroids
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Detroit Free Press: Free to Kill
“Free to Kill,” a seven-month Detroit Free Press investigation, found the Michigan Department of Corrections failed to properly supervise some of the most violent of the state’s roughly 70,000 offenders under its watch. A total of 88 parolees and probationers were suspected, arrested or convicted in 95 murders between Jan. 1, 2010, and Aug. 31, 2011. The number nearly doubled from 2010 to 2011 -- from 21 to 38. The series also revealed that dozens of offenders weren't outfitted with court-ordered electronic tethers, and others weren't sent back to prison for new crimes or failed drug tests.
Tags: Department of Corrections; violence; criminals; drug tests
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Port Authority: Battle at the Waterfront
This investigation was about lies and obfuscation, and the stakes were enormous: A mayor’s election, a growing media empire and potentially billions of dollars in development. Our reporting revealed how within months of purchasing the largest media operation in San Diego County, the new owners of U-T San Diego were using their power and status to influence -- and even threaten -- government officials into helping them realize lucrative plans for developing the downtown waterfront. It also illuminated an insidious practice suspected nationwide: use of private electronic accounts to conduct the public’s business. Our reporting defined much of the discussion around the mayor’s race in the weeks before the election. In the end, the candidate at the heart of the probed was defeated.
Tags: Mayoral election; fraud; government officials; San Diego
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Justice in the Shadows
Although immigration is one of America’s most divisive, visceral, and hotly debated issues, the public rarely gets a close look at the vast law enforcement network that every year detains more than 400,000 suspected illegal immigrants. Courts often operate inside prisons, far from view. Immigration officials play by rules that would not be permitted for the police or the FBI. Here is a system heavily shielded from public scrutiny. Reporting even routine activities is a challenge. Boston Globe reporters Maria Sacchetti and Milton J. Valencia, however, penetrated the wall of secrecy. Their three-part series, “Justice in the Shadows,” revealed a dysfunctional and largely unaccountable system that locks up people who pose little threat while releasing dangerous criminals back to US streets because their home countries won’t take them back. The results, Sacchetti and Valencia showed, at times can be deadly for Americans and foreigners alike. The reporting was anything but quick or easy. Sacchetti and Valencia filed more than 20 Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies that comprise the immigration system. Nearly all of them were partially or wholly denied, purportedly to protect the privacy of the immigrants. With the federal government blocking the way, Sacchetti and Valencia found other avenues to document what was happening inside this Byzantine system, investing a year to do so. The effort to shed light on the immigration system continues: The Globe has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force the agency to reveal the names of more than 8,000 criminal foreigners released in the US because they couldn’t be deported.
Tags: security; Department of Homeland Security; illegal immigrants; FBI
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Conviction
This is a 10-year hidden camera investigation into a likely case of a wrongful conviction in New York City. Ultimately, our broadcast triggered the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to officially reopen and reinvestigate the case as part of its newly created “Conviction Integrity Unit.” Our investigation may also have led to the identity of the real murder suspect. It was reported by Luke Russert.
Tags: conviction; attorney; murder; suspect
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Fugitives from Justice
Growing numbers of criminal suspects flee the U.S. each year to evade trial for murder, rape and other serious felonies. The investigation penetrated the government secrecy that shrouds America's interntaional fugitive extradition programs, giving a voice to forgotten victims.
Tags: murder; secrecy; extradition